Commodore
May 19, 2023

Friday 19 May – shark nursery in the lagoon

We were woken up early by the vhf, lots of chat on it before 6am, we think a load of boats are heading off to Tahiti as there is not much wind after today. By 7am we had torrential rain and black clouds all around us. It was overcast most of the morning. We also spotted another boat that had arrived yesterday afternoon, as least a mile from here, but they also left this morning. We cant believe we have had this place to ourselves. Sometimes you wonder why, maybe they all know something we don’t! Two day trip motor boats arrived in the morning, anchoring at the motus nearest to us, they obviously had a day excursion with lunch included, there is a little open sided shack they used, with table and chairs where they served lunch.

We headed the other direction for a mid morning snorkel, the visibility was not that good, I suspect the heavy rain had churned things up, also the clouds didn’t help. There were some nice fish and some good coral although a lot was not in great shape, there were endless empty clam shells on the sandy floor which was a bit sad. We also had one big shark keeping tabs on us, a bit unnerving with the bad visibility.

We decided to go to the motus that the day trippers were on as we had wanted to walk around it. We anchored JeldiJeldi and walked around the beach to the lagoon on the side we hadn’t been to and there were all the guests with the staff feeding leftover scraps to loads of young Black Tip Reef sharks. It was a bit of a feeding frenzy, with loads of fish joining in too which was interesting. Most of the sharks were around one meter long, with a few babes about 50cm long, it must be a safe nursery for them here in the shallow lagoon, we certainly didn’t see any big ones, I think the reef and sand bar make it too shallow for the big ones to get in. We walked all around the motus and then went and fetched our snorkelling gear and had a lovely snorkel in the lagoon. There were some fantastic heads of coral and hundreds of brightly coloured clams. I had one little yellow fish come right up to my goggles and then nip my hand, as Rowan says he has obviously got used to humans feeding him! The current was charging through between the coral heads making it quite good exercise, but all worth it as the water was crystal clear.

We returned to PolePole very pleased with our adventure, and glad to see the day trippers left early and we had the place back to ourselves. Definitely think this is my favourite place in the Tuamotus so far which is a lovely surprise as we did not have high hopes of Rangiroa.